Officials say the Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control responds to nearly 30,000 calls per year and roughly half of them are possible abuse cases.

Website Pet-Abuse.com says Florida is the number one state in the country for the most severe animal crimes . A court put Gonzalez on the probation for a year. His wife started divorcing the 61-year-old before she turned him in.

Authorities say this is part of a bigger animal abuse problem in South Florida that doesn't seem to be going away.

"We do see a lot of it. A lot of times we wish there was more we could do. We wish there was stronger laws. We wish people would immediately go to jail and stay there,” Captain Dave Walesky, Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control, told CBS12.

"It just doesn’t make sense why people do things like that. It’s really unexplainable from my perspective. There’s no reason to justify something like that."